My Secret History

  It was I think the effect of people talking. I had always written down what people said, their exact words. Nothing was more human than direct speech. It could be very simple, the place making it extraordinary. In the most remote part of Afghanistan, in the worst and dirtiest hotel I had ever seen, I was playing the game of Hearts with an American hippy. We had traveled overland from Istanbul, two thousand miles, and had just arrived in a settlement with three buildings. A telephone rang. The hippy yelled, “If it’s for me, tell them I’m out!”

  I had come across just that sort of thing in a book about the West Indies by Anthony Trollope. It was a scene, like a scene in a novel, that took place in a shoe shop in Jamaica. It was all dialogue, it was comic, and it seemed to have nothing to do with Jamaica. But it was telling, it was Jamaican, and it mattered because it was memorable.

  So far my writing had saved me. That was also how I had managed my trip. I saw it in the notebooks. I had been very lonely traveling. I had missed Jenny and Jack. I had always thought of myself as a homesick traveler. But by writing, and especially by not writing about the very thing that was bothering me—not indulging myself—I was able to make something new of my experience, and I created a mood of appreciation. In writing well and giving the experience order I gained a perspective and discovered my place in it.

  On the trip I was less intense than I was now, because I had been heading home to my happy family, or so I had thought. I had been wrong, and I found myself in a truer, colder, more imprisoning Siberia than the one I had left. I could not rely on anyone’s help in getting me out of it. No one was waiting for me now—that was the worst of it, but it was also a spur. I saw that when I was writing I was not only changing my mood, I was actually using this solitude and loneliness and all the freezing indifference of the world to make a good thing; turning failure into its opposite, something sunny.

  But Siberia remained. Siberia was the unfinished book; and Siberia was also the world around me every day when I stopped writing. Nothing depressed me so suddenly or made me doubt myself so swiftly than the question, “How’s your work going?”

  Then I was reminded of my secret life—the room in which I both worked and slept. I was living far from the civilized world and trying to make sense of where I was. In the past I had written out of a different anxiety: I had been mocking ghosts to show I was not afraid. It had worked.

  But now I was in Siberia and I was terrified. Hiding that terror in my writing—because I was determined not to freeze—made my writing breezy and gave it strange grace notes. In the best comedy, there is clearly something wrong, but it is secret and unstated—not even implied. Comedy is the public version of a private darkness. The funnier it is the more one must speculate on how much terror lies hidden. I had just discovered that simple truth. In writing, though, I was not trying to be funny; I was just trying not to be gloomy. Sometimes I was drowning and sometimes swimming, and I was often surprised I hadn’t died.

  I was also taking the trip for the second time, and now I knew where to go and what to do. That was the beauty of a travel book. It was true of most other writing, too: it was a second chance. What looked like the gift of prophecy was no more than hindsight.

  This time on the trip I was alone. I was an alien. I did not belong in this country and I had to face the fact that if I had died it would not have mattered. There was always someone else to take your place. There had been someone. From time to time, as fuel, I saw distinctly the scene in the warm, well-lighted room at Greville Lodge. The fearful faces. All the food. Wilkie trembling. “Eat it!” The man’s wrinkled lips as he swallowed, and then “My eyes!” I laughed. But though I was ashamed I would have done it again.

  I was writing for my life, I was writing to prove that I existed. It was as though I was inventing a written language, innovating a book, originating a point of view; taking deep breaths and trying to come alive.

  Each day when Jenny set off for work I crept into my room and I wrote. Some days I worked by candlelight. The miners’ strike caused these blackouts. I loved them—the sudden darkness, the helpless city lit by flashlights and candles; everything locked and closed, like a plague city. It was the way I felt—a big city lit by candles, only part of my mind engaged, muddling through. On the days that Jenny was home I hardly worked. I went out, and walked, and I realized what a foreigner I was, and how little I belonged. And so when I worked I worked with passion. It was like facing a blizzard and shouting into the wind. It didn’t affect the wind but it made me strong.

  The days lengthened. At some point the miners’ strike ended, and both sides claimed victory. The light sharpened, and there was more of it. That helped. And spring came. Some evenings Jenny came home and said, “What do you do all day?” I did not say. Spring deepened and progressed. It was then I discovered the only predictable season in England. Summer was uncertain and often cold. Autumn was chilly and no sooner had the leaves changed color than they were gone. They did not fall as they did in Massachusetts. They were torn off the trees by the wind, or else soaked and splatted on the street. Winter was damp and dark; the dampness was colder than frost. But spring came on time, in overlapping phases and echoes; it was a feeling, then a suggestion of color, and a new temperature, and then it began to surge. It was like a song, with a chorus, a round perhaps, sung over and over again, growing louder and greener, becoming warmer; and the whole season came out of the ground.

  I was making progress on my work. I needed the routine, and Jenny’s indifference and Jack’s demands were part of that same routine. I needed to make meals, I needed to wash the dishes, I needed to stop. It was necessary that I feel like a prisoner; it was crucial to my wishing to free myself. I had fitted my writing into all of this.

  The trip had taken four and a half months. The book took exactly the same length of time to write. I now saw that it was a book. I had never found that an easy word to say.

  On the day that I wrote the last page I left the house earlier than usual and went for a long walk before meeting Jack. I was an alien, a stranger, but this city did not frighten me anymore. The ugly brick houses did not depress me any longer. It did not matter that there were no vistas and that I could not see farther than the end of the road. I stopped dreaming about dying here and being buried in a muddy hole in Catford, beside the tracks. It had been a hard winter, but I had come through it. I was not afraid anymore. My work was done.

  “How’s your work coming?”

  “It’s a book,” I said. But I was too superstitious to claim that it was all finished. “Almost done.”

  “I’m sure it’s good,” Jenny said.

  She had not seen a word of it; no one had. That secrecy made me strong.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I liked it for being a new thing, but I could not say it was good. And yet I was not worried.

  8.

  It did not matter to me whether the book was good or not, though I was sure it was funny, and I knew there was merit in that. I believed that comedy was the highest expression of truth. This traveling would not say everything to everyone but it had something for some people, I was sure. They were people like me. In the course of writing I had stopped seeing myself as special or different and began to think: There are many people like me. I had written the book in order to lose myself, and they would read it for the same reason, to get through their own Siberian winter.

  There was one thing more that satisfied me. This was precisely the book I had in mind, the one I had set out to write. I wasn’t looking for praise, only a way of ending the trip; and had done what I intended. When the book was finished the trip was over. Now I was really and truly home.

  I liked looking at the stack of paper. A book was a physical thing, and writing seemed to me like one of the plastic arts. I enjoyed holding the whole ream of it and bumping it on my desk and clapping it square with my hands. It was quite a bundle. I loved weighing it and then opening it at random, and squaring it up again.

  It was unlike any othe
r book I had written. And I had made it less out of my trip than out of my misery and disillusionment. I had been dying; and this was a way of living. For every reason I could think of, this was a strange and happy book. And now that it was done I could hand it over and go on living. In the course of writing it I had other ideas—for stories, for a novel. And never once did I think of a story that went: Once there was a man who returned from a long trip to discover that his wife had taken a lover. That was my secret, and not revealing it was the source of my strength. I saw that I had lived my whole life that way, drawing energy from secrecy, and feeding my imagination on what I kept hidden.

  Jenny and I entered that emotional region that is past disappointment and fury, and beyond argument. We had arrived at a kind of peaceful aridity that is probably despair. Fury is life, but this was nothing like that. We had long since stopped arguing. She had given up on me, and I had retreated to my room and my book. Because she had despaired of me she hadn’t disturbed me. I had said hurtful things to her and she had replied with that utterly stupid formula, “I’ll never forgive you—”

  It was the end of June, and warm. London had a sweet smell of new leaves and fresh flowers. I had the time now to take long walks and in these hours I felt lucky to be an alien: I could possess the city but the city could never possess me. Once I had been gloomy about not belonging, but these days I saw that it made me free.

  Completing the book—that happiness—made me feel generous and calm. And bold, too. Nothing bad could happen to me, because I had proven that I could overcome the worst.

  I did not really know how things stood between Jenny and me, but I felt strong enough to endure anything she might say: that she wanted to leave me or that she disliked me. I did not blame her any longer for what had happened. It had driven me crazy but I was sane again. I was prepared to forgive, even if I could never forget—forgetting seemed to me stupid and sloppy.

  It was clear to me that in the course of writing the book I had lost touch with her. I decided to be deliberate.

  “Let’s have lunch,” I said. “I mean, up in town.”

  She was surprised, but tried not to show it. She said evasively, “The places near the bank are so crowded and noisy.”

  I suspected that she was afraid of me. I might start screaming at her in a restaurant: You traitor! You whore! I’m taking Jack away and you’ll never see him again! The fury might come back. Wasn’t it better to continue just as we had been doing, in a mood of desperate resignation?

  I said, “We could have a picnic in Regent’s Park. I’d bring sandwiches.”

  “It’s so much trouble,” she said, which was one of her ways of saying no.

  “I have nothing else to do,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the bank.”

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  She was uncertain of me. She knew I was capable of making a scene. I was the man who had conned his way into Wilkie’s house and, at gunpoint—well, at least it looked like one—had made the assistant manager eat a piece of paper. I had dripped on the floor. I had been crazy. I could be crazy again.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  She was asking whether I was crazy, and would I make a mess of it, and perhaps what was the point?

  I said, “It’ll be fun. Jack can have his lunch at school.”

  She looked frightened, but said yes, probably because she suspected I might become violent if she said no.

  There were stares at the bank, and slightly worse than stares, people looking nervously away, pretending they were not interested: the absurd and wooden motions of people trying to act normal.

  “I have an appointment to see Mrs. Parent.”

  “May I have your name?”

  Surely they knew me? But they wanted to hear me say it. This was drama for them.

  “I’m her husband.”

  That produced a sudden silence that was instantly filled with a buzz. I was admitted to the inner office. Slee was at his desk, concentrating intensely on a piece of paper. He was frozen in that posture, just like a squirrel on a branch when humans appear below, hoping to be invisible and sticking out a mile.

  Jenny hurried down the stairs as soon as she got the message. She was nervous and wanted to be away from these people and this place. The bank had become a theater, and Jenny and I the actors. Everything we did mattered, and even her fear that I might revert and go haywire was obvious in her movements and part of the plot.

  Some of the people when I glanced at them suddenly seemed to be smiling at me. When I smiled back they looked alarmed.

  In the taxi, Jenny sat back and said, “It’s a lovely day for a picnic.”

  There was mingled exhaustion and relief in her voice. It had been an ordeal, my meeting her at the bank. But I had played my part well, and she was grateful.

  She smiled and said, “When it’s hot in June that usually means we have a rotten summer.”

  “Summer’s always beautiful in the States.”

  She glanced at me, a question on her face.

  “I was hoping we could go there in July.”

  “Where will we get the money?”

  “This book. As soon as I deliver the manuscript I’ll get two and a half thousand—the last payment. It’s more than enough.”

  She said what I felt: “It’s something to look forward to.”

  The taxi set us down at the Inner Circle. We walked into the park and found a patch of grass near the rose garden.

  “There’s some significance about the rose garden in the Four Quartets, but I forget what it is. Anyway,” I said, as I took the sandwiches out of my bag, “this is not the time for T. S. Eliot. Have a sandwich.”

  They were cheese sandwiches—dry and droopy in the heat. There were also hard-boiled eggs, and some tangerines and chocolate cookies. When I set out everything on the grass it looked mismatched, rather frugal and childish.

  “What a pathetic picnic,” I said.

  “It looks delicious,” Jenny said, and began to cry.

  I started to explain that it hadn’t been any trouble, and that I had more time now that I had finished my work; but she was sobbing—the odd gratitude of tears that is impossible to interrupt.

  There was a formality and dignity in her tears, too, and she said, “Thank you for coming back to us.”

  I was too moved to speak, and afraid that if I did I might cry.

  We ate in silence. The sun on the grass warmed us with its buttery light. The air stirred slightly and brought us the fragrance from the rose garden.

  “I was very unfair to you,” Jenny said, at last. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  I had already made up my mind that I would, and though the wound still remained it was better to live with it than to pretend that it didn’t exist. And anyway the wound she inflicted on me proved that we were both human.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to leave me,” she said.

  I was strong enough to be on my own now; but I was saner, as well, and I was rational enough to know how much I loved her and needed her love. When I had left Siberia I’d had no choice but to press on and finish the thing by finishing the book. I had done it in cold winds and black night, and alone. Now that I was done I had a choice. But I was back again, and crudely stated, getting back again seemed to me the object of all writing. It had been a long journey from Siberia.

  “I want to be happy, the way we were before.”

  “I haven’t made you happy,” she said. “But if you give me a chance I think I could.”

  She kissed me and brushed my eyes with her tears.

  “I missed you,” she said. There were tears smearing her lips. “Oh, God, I missed you.”

  I cried too and felt happy as I sobbed, and even happier afterwards. Then we simply lay side by side on the grass, listening to people in the rose garden saying “Isn’t it lovely and warm,” and “It’s absolutely smashing,” and “I want an ice-lolly.”

  I was happy because I had her as a friend once again,
and I was happy because my work was done. I saw that the only thing that mattered was that the book had been written in my way. The long trip had been described comically while I had remained trapped in a mood of great grief. And fear had been one of the components of that comedy. A person who is doomed writes best about life—appreciates it, anyway. The whole object had been to write the book. That was satisfactory, and it did not matter at all what came after—publication, reviews, sales, and promotion could only be an anticlimax. Writing the book had been a way of living with dignity.

  I could not tell her any of this. There were things I could write, but I was incapable of saying them. My being inarticulate was probably the reason I had become a writer, and why I had developed such habits of secrecy.

  “We’d better go,” I said. “You’ll be late.”

  “I’d like to spend the rest of the day here.”

  “There’ll be plenty of other days.”

  She looked at me, smiling with her tearstained face, and she said, “Why are you being nice to me?”

  I hadn’t realized that I was being especially nice to her, but being happy was part of not noticing. I told her that I was happy, and she smiled. It was a gift to be happy and to know it at the time. Life could be so simple, and was happiest at its simplest. Secrecy had made me miserable, my own and hers.

  When I leaned over to kiss her, I glanced beyond her and saw in the distance one of those low green hills in the park where in my dreams I took off and flew, my arms out like gull wings—not flapping but soaring over people’s heads, just above the ground. I had felt the wind buffet my chest and create a kind of pressure that held me up, and then weakened and dropped me.

  During the next month I was excited at the thought that we were going to the States. That for me meant going the rest of the way home. And I had an idea for more work: the novel which began with a man at the window, watching the father being humiliated in the road blow, and the son looking on—the novel would be the consequences of that little scene. It was all I wanted, time and ideas; that was all I needed to be happy. Everything was possible with her love. Through an effort of will I had written my book without being conscious of her love, which was why the book was strange and necessary. I was almost certain it would be incomprehensible to everyone except those people who somewhat resembled me. How many of them could there be?